Nice sunny day.. KDE-3.0 grumble, grumble.

First the good thing.. it’s nice, warm and sunny! This means I’ll have to mow the meadow in the back garden tonight.

Secondly, I’m annoyed at the KDE maintainers who profess that the KDE-3.0 release was fit for compilation on Linux and Solaris out of the box.. they lied.. It compiles on neither without a good hacking of header files and config scripts. It is obvious that no-one has taken the whole release tree, put it on a clean machine and tried to run the complete compile process from scratch. This is the sort of thing which gives Open Source software a bad name.

Some would say “why not use one of the binary distributions?” To that I’d reply that most of these distributions are built with an isolated, single machine in mind. We need here to have the distribution to sit under a directory structure on a networked, shared disk and we need it to co-exist with previous versions. The binary distributions for linux are almost always packaged as non-relocatable RPMs which throw everything into /usr (<RANT>where only the base OS should ever go, not optional or local software </RANT>). The solaris packages usually muck up the /etc/dt dtlogin stuff. Grrrrrr!

1 thought on “Nice sunny day.. KDE-3.0 grumble, grumble.

  1. Yeah, this is my #1 reason for not using unix variants – the amount of effort I see you guru-types have to put into simply installing pieces of software.

    So I’m stuck using Windows or a Mac.

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